Becoming a magician
If you want to become a ‘magician’, the ones that with intricate moves and skills to amaze the audience, you’ll need to adopt a growing mindset:
you cannot become a ‘magician’ with the same progress rate, or by simply imagining a better self: sometimes the way to changes involves a fundamental shift in how you see the world. And to achieve that you’ll need to observe fellow ‘magicians’, learn the difference, and make non-linear progresses.
How to Get Rich (Without getting lucky)
Some interesting takeaways:
- You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
- Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
- Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
- Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
I don’t usually like the “success stories” or “how to become rich” genre of books/blogs/articles, and I keep my suspicions with this one, too. Nevertheless I find most of the principles described in this blog reasonable, and the author sounded sincere: build skills, build trust, build networks, build leverages, and finally, build your own brand.
There are quite a few books out there how to teach you to be “successful”, and some time I’d like to do some research on those, with more caution than I approach other books.
Are We Living in the Gilded Age 2.0 ?
Extraordinary similarities observed between right now, and the late 19 century to early 21 century, where technology brings human society unrivaled fortune and wealth - unevenly. The society underwent serious transformation, and paved way to modern liberalism. The same might be expected, or not. History never follows scripts.
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
Another great piece from Michael Neilsen, on how Anki systems help improve not just memory, but the whole process of understanding itself.
The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - the man who told the truth. He spread the knowledge of the gulag system and how it’s used to suppress and mistreat people, and undermined the credibility of the Soviet Union Iron Curtain empire, one of the many factors that brought it to its knees.
It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights
The new digital age problems require new solutions. In the article the author proposed the following ‘Bill of Rights’ for the new digital age:
- The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable surveillance shall not be violated.
- No person shall have his or her behavior surreptitiously manipulated.
- No person shall be unfairly discriminated against on the basis of data.